Saturday, March 13, 2010

"Walmart pricing a darker-skinned version of the Ballerina Theresa doll less than its white counterpart...

Walmart claimed that the doll was priced less because they were trying to move inventory...

We know that people of all colors tend to absorb a color hierarchy in which whiteness is nicer, more beautiful, and more valuable...

I think it is perfectly fine to discount white dolls while other dolls are left undiscounted, but not vice versa. Why? Because we live in a world where discounting dark-skinned dolls resonates with a discourse the symbolically devalues dark-skinned human beings. Discounting white dolls simply does not carry the same problematic message"

Yet, pricing black dolls the same as white dolls is RACIST because black people are poorer than white people. So you just cannot win.

So much for being judged not by the color of your skin, but by the content of your character - it's alright to symbolically devalue some people, but not others.

More nonsensical comments:

"The black doll is not just on sale: it’s on clearance, while the white doll is continuing to sell normally. The clearance tag sends the message that they’re actually just trying to get rid of it".

And of course some others go on about how evil capitalism is, and that that is the root cause. Naturally, a dissenting commenter is accused of trolling even though he wants to turn attention to "real problems"; "the residual socioeconomic crap that non-whites have to deal with".

More sensible comments:

i) "A non-automated system, aka judgment based, would open them up to all kinds of problems and liabilities...

Everyone saying Wal-Mart should eat the loss and price them equally; go spend YOUR money buying the darker-skinned dolls to drive up demand. It’s a heck of a lot easier to say that someone else should throw their money into fixing perceived inequality than it is to do it yourself.

Wal-Mart’s margins are low as is. They deal in volume and supply chain efficiencies, not in taking one for the politically correct team. They don’t want (and can’t really have in their current business model) the overhead required to culturally check every pricing decision, stocking decision, point-of-purchase placement decision, etc. That’s simply not realistic."

Not to mention that that will raise prices, which will disproportionately hurt blacks, which is racist in itself.

ii) "The thing is, the person at Walmart who made the decision to put the black doll on sale, probably didn’t even know what item it was – just SKU4792 or whatever. There’s a huge database that tracks sales curves and all that stuff, and it pops out pricing recommendations daily (or even more often). If anybody even reviews it, they just see that SKU4792 is selling at the rate of only X per day, and with a backstock of Y, they need to start clearing it out so they can have turnover of 42 days or less, or whatever."

"Actual data about any research demonstrated effects of pornography were sparse and many significant studies and findings were omitted [in pornography discussions]...

The other side of the argument holds that pornography is an expression of fantasies that provide pleasure (Christensen, 1990), are media that can inhibit sexual activity (Wolf, 2003), and materials that can act as a positive displacement activity for sexual aggression (D'Amato, 2006). And identified feminists like Camille Paglia (Paglia, 1991), Leonore Tieffer (Tiefer, 1986), N.B. McKormick (McKormick, 1994) and others consider that pornography actually empowers women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and anti-sexual restrictions...

With such strong feelings at stake what is the evidence for demonstrated negative or positive effects of pornography? Considering that the production, distribution and sale of sexually explicit materials are worldwide and part of a multi-billion dollar industry with ready access to anyone with a computer, or a so-called “Adult” store, one would think the negative affects, if actual, would be obvious and readily available...

Bauserman concluded: “Rape rates are not consistently associated with pornography circulation. And the relationships found are ambiguous. Findings are [not] consistent with . . . the view that sexually explicit materials in general contribute directly to sex crimes (page 405)”...

Surprisingly few studies have linked the availability of porn in any society with actual associated antisocial behaviors or sex crimes in particular. None have found a causal relationship and very few have even found one of positive correlation... Classroom studies, both on methodological as well as theoretical grounds have been strongly criticized...

While pornography became increasingly available, there was an overall decrease in sexual offenses. When considering cases of rape in particular, cases were down to fewer than 2 percent of the arrests. In comparison to the sex related charges, cases of other major non-sex related crimes e.g., homicide, increased by 4 percent for the same interval. This overall period, it should be noted, was an era of increased availability of pornography even for materials previously considered obscene (Rembar 1968). As noted in the following section comparable findings have been found in Scandinavia, Asia and Europe...

Walker found that exposure to the portrayal of heterosexual intercourse was first seen by rapists when they were on average 18 years old but by control males three years younger. Nutter and Kearns (1993), in similar research, found that child molesters were significantly older than controls when exposed to sexually explicit materials...

Green (1992) has reported that sex offenders requesting treatment commonly disclose that pornography helps them contain their abnormal sexuality within imagination as a fantasy instead of their aggressively acting out in real life...

The police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography... Rapists were more likely than non-rapists in the prison population to having been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster. And such was by no means common among the rest of the prison population... what does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing (Goldstein & Kant, 1973). Green too reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of "normal" males (Green, 1980). This is certainly a thought-stimulating finding...

Every country so far examined has shown parallel findings: as pornography became available sex crimes decreased rather than increased...

There has not been demonstrated any cause and effect relationship between viewing child porn and the actual commission of child abuse. In the only three countries known in which child porn has been legally available, Denmark (Kutchinsky, 1973), Japan (Diamond & Uchiyama, 1999) and the Czech Republic (Diamond, Weiss & Joziflova, in press) the incidence of child sexual abuse declined after possession of child porn was decriminalized. It has been argued that there are more problems with censorship of sexual information and other erotic material from minors than there are advantages...

Many persons express an opinion regarding pornography (or other matters) based on what they think is the effect on others, not themselves. It has been shown that, while people themselves may not think porn is harmful or capable of inciting sexual transgressions, they often think it might have such an effect on others... Females are more likely to believe their attitudes are more similar to those of other females than males and both males and females project worse effects to other males)...

Psychologists Padgett et al. (Padget et al., 1989) compared the attitudes toward women in a sample of patrons of an adult movie theater with a college sample of men and women. Their findings essentially and significantly showed the patrons of an adult movie theater had more favorable attitudes toward women than either male or female college students... men and women who had seen an X-rated movie in the past year were more gender equal than those who had not seen any...

Addendum: Those men who went to X-rated movies were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men that didn’t...

Studies by other investigators, female as well as male, (Barak, Fisher, Belfry, & Lashambe, 1999; L. Baron, 1990; Davies, 1997) essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship of the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause and effect relationship between exposure to SEM and ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women...

Fisher and Grenier (1994) tried to experimentally provoke men to negative, aggressive and violent attitudes in their fantasies, attitudes and behaviors toward women. Using female accomplices they prepared situations to negatively bias men who would then be shown aggressive and even violent videos, in which women were degraded, objectified or raped. Their efforts produced essentially no measurable misogynistic effects. And Bogaert (1993) has shown that, in a free choice setting where men were offered choice of 14 different video types to view, their least common choices, in this free-choice setting, were to see sexually violent videos (4%) or child pornography (3%). The majority given a free choice chose non-violent videos with common sexual acts with sexually interested women...

Ann Ferguson and colleagues (Ferguson et al., 1984) discuss the differences they see among feminists in their regard to pornography... “radical-feminists” [and] “libertarian-feminists”... “both sides tend to categorize each other essentially as either virgins or whores. This dichotomous thinking has served to increase the polarization on these issues (Russo, 1987, page 103).” Some group representatives will not even debate or attend a debate with those of the other side...

Further insight as to how women in-general self-perceive pornography can be drawn from a study of almost 700 men and 400 women aged 18-30 years by Hald and Malamuth (2007). Their study showed that “both men and women generally reported small to moderate positive (emhasis added) effects of hardcore pornography consumption and little, if any, negative effects of such consumption (page 621)”...

Many feminist legal scholars [like] Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law... argue that the legal prohibition of pornography in accordance with a Dworkin and MacKinnon position on pornography and free speech reinforces sexist stereotypes about men as “irresponsible beasts with ‘natural physiological responses’ which can be triggered by sexually explicit images of women, and for which men cannot be held accountable” and sexist stereotypes about women such as that they are incapable of consent and that “‘good’ women do not seek and enjoy sex...

The laws against rape are essentially almost as severe as those against murder...

There are many myths that seem to persist regardless of the refuting evidence. Despite the often voiced contention that exposure to violent movies leads to violent action research has shown that film violence seems to act as a substitute for violent crime in society (Dahl & DellaVigna, 2006). And while watching many hours of television has been blamed on children’s poor test scores studies have shown the opposite... It is a similar myth that pornography has exhibited a causal relationship to antisocial or unlawful acts or sexual violence. Such a conclusion by the Meese report and others was and is based more on politics than evidence"

Friday, March 12, 2010

"There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else." - James Thurber

***

When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do - "About the last time in our lives when books have this kind of potent effect on us is in our early 20s, which not coincidentally tends to be the age of people you see poring over Nietzsche or that awful Ayn Rand... part of the reason art loses its power over us, of course, is, simply and sadly, that we get old... the reading we do as children may be more serious than any reading we'll ever do again. Books for children and young people are unashamedly prescriptive: They're written, at least in part, to teach us what the world is like, how people are, and how we should behave... A collection innocuously called The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense became an object of hysterical fear for me because it contained a chapter of translated Struwwelpeter, those grim German verses about ill-behaved children (they refuse to eat soup, they slam doors) who meet with what are presented as well-deserved, fitting deaths (starvation, getting clocked by a marble bust). These stories are products of the same German child-rearing tradition that produced grownups like Hitler... Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction... Salinger and Vonnegut both give voice to the adolescent passion for justice, their dogmatic, almost fanatical, fairness and decency, and their blooming disgust at the epiphany that the world adults are foisting on them is neither fair nor decent"

Where do atheists come from? - "There is no straightforward relationship between atheism and education... only 29.6 per cent of those without even an elementary education believe in telepathy, compared with 51.8 per cent of people with degree-level education... Looking at white British people, for example, the findings show that only around 25 per cent of men aged between 25 and 34 claiming "no religion" have degrees, compared with around 40 per cent of those describing themselves as religious"

Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists? - "Far from trailing the developed world in science education, as some claim, “on PISA, the U.S. has more high-scoring kids in science than any other country” and nearly as many in the top math category as top-scoring Japan and Korea... U.S. students are by far the most diverse of any industrialized country, ranging from some of the world’s best-prepared to some of the worst among the developed countries... scientists are not generally recruited from the average students... Compared with the products of Asian secondary schools, American students “are free thinkers... They didn’t spend the last 12 years of their lives memorizing books…. They’ve spent the last 12 years dealing with real problems and solving them. [In America], you can walk up to your teacher and tell her that she’s wrong or he’s wrong.” In Asia, he continues, “you wouldn’t dare do that”... “No one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general ‘shortages’ of scientists and engineers,” according to Teitelbaum. Salaries, for example, have not risen, as would happen in a shortage... Despite a longstanding dismal job market in academic science, however, departments continue to recruit graduate students and postdocs because they need skilled and inexpensive labor to do the work promised in professors’ grant proposals"

1,001 Arabian Nights of Sex - "Ramzi El Khoury, the founder of an Arabic-language Internet portal, kicked up the temperature on the discussion during the second International Summit on Internet and Multimedia when he cited a study that found that 80 percent of Arab-world Internet traffic heads for sex sites... "If it's illegal, then people want it. It's not because they are oversexed, or their sexual needs are more than other people. But if you make something illegal, especially something as natural as sex, then it becomes more in demand.""

Don’t Stand So Close to Me - "Men prefer not to stand next to each other in the urinals, and the closer other men are to each other, the longer it takes for them to begin urinating, and the shorter the persistence of their stream"

Hobson’s Choice: Can Freud's Theory of Dreams hold up against Modern Neuroscience? - "[Hobson] and his Harvard colleague Robert McCarley proposed that dreams are strange and fragmented not because secret urges are being censored, as Freud claimed, but because the brain is in a naturally chaotic state. During REM sleep, the phase most ripe for dreaming, the brain stem sends random signals up to parts of the forebrain that control emotions, movement, vision, and hearing, and these higher brain centers patch together a story out of the electrical input. Hobson accused psychoanalysts of reading dreams as pieces of literature and creating narratives when there weren’t any... "To be wrong about something so important as human motivation is a capital sin"... “Freud knew he needed brain science to make a decent theory, but he didn’t have it. So he went off and woolgathered. He’s a brilliant man, super stuff, great writing. But it’s all wrong”... "When Einstein came up with his theory of relativity and basically said that everything Newton found was subtly wrong, there were no people out there screaming, ‘How dare you, how dare you challenge the laws of Newton!’” But Freud has a peculiar hold on people, in part, perhaps, because his theories make so much sense... during sleep the part of the brain that controls drives is much more active than the part of the brain associated with executive functions, like orientation and logic"

Window cleaner killed himself with giant souvenir pencil, inquest hears - "A window cleaner died after stabbing himself in the groin repeatedly with a jumbo souvenir pencil... East Sussex coroner Alan Craze told the Hastings inquest: “It’s a mystery to me. If you were choosing to take your own life, that’s not the way you would do it. “It seems to me that it can’t have been a single stab wound. He seems to have worked on it. The pencil was blunt.”"

Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata. - "Music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something"

'Hurt Locker' Beats 'Avatar': On the Oscar Winner, Loser - "Remember, to win Best Picture you don't have to make the best picture; you have to make the picture that appeals to the voters, who are older, politically liberal and artistically conservative... Consider that in 1942, the Academy gave its top awards, Best Picture and Director, to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a poignant evocation of a Welsh mining town. Fine, honorable, fully worthy. The film it beat: Citizen Kane. Who needs all those low-angle shots, the deep-focus cinematography, the oblique, multifaceted view of a powerful publisher? Those aren't innovations; they're ostentations — cinematic showing off. Thus the Academy blew its chance to give due homage to what is still considered the greatest American movie"

US anti-gay rights senator Roy Ashburn comes out - "A conservative US state senator who has voted against gay rights measures during his 14 years in office has confessed he is gay... Mr Ashburn said his votes reflected the way his constituents wanted him to vote"This man is admirable. Not many politicians are this principled.

Chef at Chelsea restaurant offers customers a taste of cheese made from his wife's breast milk - " "Some people who clearly have issues have . . . e-mailed me saying, 'I wasn't breast-fed as a child, so can I taste your breast milk?' " she said. Mason politely declines the offer. "I'm not here to walk people through their psychological problems""One comment: "The breast milk cheese ain't so bad, it's the beer he brewed using his wife's yeast infection that's Gawd-awful."

You're a jerk, Jack - "A YOUNG French student is the latest to claim that film-maker Jack Neo hit on her - when she was only 16 more than five years ago. Maelle Meurzec, now 21, told The New Paper in an interview at her Upper East Coast road home on Tuesday night, that the 50-year-old movie director hit on her while she was acting in his movie I Do I Do in Nov 2004... The pretty Singaporean citizen of French descent, then a model with MC Models, did not mince her words in the TNP interview, calling Neo 'a bit of a creep', 'a sleazebag' and 'a jerk'"Outstanding. Was it empowering for Asian men that Jack Neo hit on a French girl?

How I dream about you...My heart, a ball of flame, rested lightly on a patch of green. Thebeauty all around, the trees, the wind an the sun. My heart pulsedfaster, just with a thought I had finally found my Prince. You staythere, leaning against the willow tree. You stay, watching my heart,then I get alive. I rise in the place of my heart, walking trying tofind you. You staystraighter, walking to me slowly, hesitantly, I didn't understand. Youwhisper, "I found you, my precious rose" and you look into my eyes.You whisper softly against my ear, "I love you, my rose, I love you."The ice will be gone forever, I will be so much alive! I need youclose, I fear the ice returning. I like the fire. Wait, no... I needthe fire in my soul! Find me here weareforlove.net/winking/

"Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical (labor) incomes at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male annual earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points at ten to 16 years after MBA completion. We identify three proximate reasons for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: differences in training prior to MBA graduation; differences in career interruptions; and differences in weekly hours"

In other words, women are paid less because they are less well-trained (they take fewer finance courses and have lower GPAs), take time off from working and work less.

In fact if anything it seems men are discriminated against in this sample.

Other studies show similar results for different and more general professions.

Intriguingly:

"Women in our sample with children are not negatively selected on predicted earnings; MBA mothers are, if anything, positively selected on business school performance and earnings in the first few years following MBA completion"

"Among women without children greater spousal earnings appear to increase, rather than decrease, labor supply. In fact, a woman without children married to high-earnings spouse is about as likely to work (the gap is only 2 percentage points), to accumulate post-MBA work experience, and to put in a long work week (women are actually higher by 3 log points) as the typical male in our sample. These findings suggest positive assortative mating based on preferences for work"

"Labor supply factors explain most of the remaining gender gap in earnings... Augmenting the model with (arguably less exogenous) variables to control for reasons for choosing one’s current job, job function, and employer type further reduces the coefficient on the female dummy to a (statistically insignificant) –3.8 log points"

"Although it is possible that women are more heavily penalized for taking time out, estimates from separate earnings regressions by sex... do not support that suspicion... Taking any time out appears more harmful for men (26 log points) than for women (11 log points)."

"Married women have slightly higher predicted earnings than unmarried women and those with children have slightly higher predicted earnings than those without children, using a measure of predicted earnings based on pre-MBA characteristics and MBA performance"I suspect omitted variable bias due to aesthetic appeal here. In other words, pretty women earn more.

"If MBA mothers were being sidelined in their current jobs, one might have expected them to be more likely to quit (or even be forced out) for career-related reasons. Yet, we find little evidence of that"

"Female MBAs appear to have a more difficult time combining career and family than do female physicians, PhDs, and lawyers... female MBAs often have husbands with higher earnings than female PhDs and MDs allowing them the luxury to slowdown in the market and spend more time with their children"

Thursday, March 11, 2010

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read." - G. K. Chesterton

***

On finding what you are looking for:

"A second view is that chronic targets of discrimination are vigilant to cues in their environment that signal that they may be targets of prejudice and discrimination, and may see discrimination when it does not objectively exist...

Cohen, Steele, and Ross (1999) found that African-American college students who received critical feedback on an essay were more likely to say that the evaluator was biased than were European-American students who received the same type of feedback, even though both groups had received identical critical comments and the essays had been corrected blind to race of essay. African-American students did not see the evaluator as more biased, however, when the critical comments were accompanied by comments indicating that the evaluator thought the essay writer was capable of meeting high standards. This study makes the important point that vigilance is sensitive to contextual cues: some cues made African-American students vigilant to bias that did not objectively exist, and other cues mitigated this vigilance...

The motivation to protect self-esteem from threat (ego-defense) may also underlie vigilance to prejudice (Allport, 1954/1979). People engage in a wide variety of self-serving strategies to protect and enhance their personal (individual) and social (collective) self-esteem (Pyszczynski et al., 1997; Rosenberg and Simmons, 1972; Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Blaming negative outcomes on external causes, such as the prejudice of others, rather than on internal causes, such as one’s own lack of ability, can help to protect self-esteem under some circumstances (Crocker and Major, 1989; Major, Kaiser and McCoy, 2003).

Furthermore, for groups that historically have been targets of discrimination, prejudice and discrimination are likely to be repeatedly primed and highly accessible cognitive constructs (Inman and Baron, 1996). As a result, the possibility of discrimination may be easily activated in ambiguous circumstances and bias perceptions of those circumstances. Members of disadvantaged groups (women), for example, are more likely to label negative actions committed by a high status perpetrator against a low status victim as discrimination than are members of privileged groups (men) who witness the same action (Rodin, Price, Bryson, and Sanchez, 1990). In sum, there are both motivational and cognitive reasons why chronic targets of discrimination may be vigilant for, and sometimes overestimate the extent to which they are targets of discrimination...

A growing body of experimental research indicates that either minimization/underestimation or vigilance/overestimation may occur, depending upon characteristics of the situation and on characteristics of the person...

Alerting people to the possibility of discrimination increases their vigilance for seeing discrimination as a cause of negative outcomes. For example, in one set of studies, women were led to expect that their work would be evaluated by a panel of male judges. Some women were told that none of the judges discriminated against women, some were told that 50% of the judges discriminated, and some were told that 100% discriminated. Not surprisingly, women who were led to expect discriminatory judges were more likely to blame a subsequent poor evaluation on discrimination than women who did not expect discriminatory judges. More interesting was the finding that women led to expect that half of the judges discriminated were just as likely to blame poor feedback on discrimination as women who had been told that all of judges discriminated (Inman, 2001; Kaiser and Miller, 2001a). These studies indicate that leading people to expect discrimination affects their interpretations of feedback. There also is evidence that subtly priming thoughts of discrimination can have an effect on perceptions (Gomez and Trierweiler, 2001). In this study, White women and African-Americans were asked how frequently they were the targets of negative events at work (such as being treated with disrespect by others). More frequent negative treatment was reported if participants responded on a questionnaire labeled “Discrimination” than if they responded on a questionnaire labeled “Everyday Experiences”...

People are more likely to report that they have been discriminated against when they are treated negatively by an outgroup member than by an ingroup member (Dion, 1975). They are also more likely to claim that they are targets of discrimination when they know that their group membership is known rather than unknown to an outgroup evaluator...

Group identification is typically conceptualized as how important the group is to self-definition and howstrong feelings of attachment to the group are (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Many studies have shown that among socially devalued groups, group identification is positively correlated with perceptions of personal, as well as group discrimination...

Women who were high or low in gender identification received a negative evaluation from a male under conditions of clear prejudice cues, ambiguous prejudice cues, or no prejudice cues. Regardless of whether they were high or low in gender identification, women did not blame their poor evaluation on discrimination in the absence of cues to prejudice and were highly likely to do so in presence of blatant cues to prejudice. When prejudice cues were ambiguous, however, gender identification mattered. Women who were highly gender identified were significantly more likely than low gender-identified women to blame a negative evaluation on sex discrimination when cues to discrimination were ambiguous. Further, highly gender-identified women were just as likely to attribute negative feedback to sex discrimination in the ambiguous cue condition as they were in the blatant cue condition. In contrast, among low gender identified women, attributions to sex discrimination were as low in the ambiguous condition as they were in the no cues condition (see figure 1). These findings suggest that in attributionally ambiguous circumstances, individuals who are highly identified with their groups are vigilant for discrimination, whereas individuals who are low in group identification minimize discrimination.

Group consciousness also is associated with more vigilance for discrimination. Group consciousness incorporates aspects of group identification as well as elements of perceived injustice directed against the group, and is sometimes referred to as “politicized group identification” (Gurin, Miller, and Gurin, 1980). Major and Quinton (2001) found significant positive correlations between feminist self-labeling (a measure of group consciousness among women) and perceptions of personal discrimination (r = 0.29) and discrimination against women...

People also differ in the extent to which they are chronically sensitive to the possibility of being a target of negative stereotypes and discrimination because of their group membership. One measure of this is “stigma-consciousness” (Pinel, 1999). Women who score high on a female-specific “stigma consciousness scale” endorse statements such as: “When interacting with men I feel like they interpret all my behaviors in terms of the fact that I am a woman”. Across a variety of stigmatized groups, including African-Americans, Latino(a)-Americans, Asian-Americans, and women, stigma consciousness is strongly and positively correlated with perceived personal and group discrimination and negatively correlated with distrust of others in general (Pinel, 1999). Furthermore, women who are high in stigma consciousness allocate more of their attention towards subliminally presented sexism-related words relative to women who are low in stigma consciousness (Kaiser, Vick, and Major, 2005).

A related construct is “race-based rejection sensitivity,” which is defined as a personal dynamic whereby individuals anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to rejection that has a possibility of being due to race (Mendoza-Denton, Purdie, Downey, Davis, and Pietrzac, 2002). Race-based rejection sensitivity is assessed by asking people to read attributionally ambiguous scenarios (e.g., “Imagine that you have just finished shopping and you are leaving the store carrying several bags. It is closing time, and several people are filing out of the store at once. Suddenly, the alarm begins to sound, and a security guard comes over to investigate.”), and to indicate, for each scenario, how concerned they are that a negative outcome would be due to their race and the likelihood that a negative outcome would be due to their race. In a longitudinal diary study, race-based rejection sensitivity assessed among African- American students before they entered a predominately White university predicted the frequency with which they reported a negative race-related experience (e.g., feeling excluded, insulted, or receiving poor service because of one’s race) during their first 3 weeks at university (Mendoza-Denton et al., 2002). Race-based rejection sensitivity also predicted their tendency to feel less belonging at the university and greater negativity toward both peers and professors. Taken together, the above studies indicate that people’s thoughts about and identification with their group influence their propensity to perceive discrimination, especially in ambiguous situations...

Some perspectives suggest that chronic targets of prejudice tend to minimize or underestimate the extent to which they are personally victimized by discrimination. Other perspectives suggest that chronic targets of prejudice are vigilant for, and sometimes oversensitive to signs that they are being personally victimized by discrimination. In our view, both responses are possible, and which response occurs depends on characteristics of the person, the situation, and the social structure. Our discussion highlights the complexity involved in detecting prejudice"

--- Perceiving and Claiming Discrimination in Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research / Brenda Major and Cheryl R. Kaiser

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

"It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem." - Malcolm Forbes

***

On ancient Savior Gods and Christian Mythology, as well as thinking on the end-times:

A: b) The contemporaneous Mediterranean cultures have many stories about mythical and legendary figures dying and rising from the dead. (Adonis and Osiris all rose from the dead in the third day. Apollonius of Tyana ascension into heaven was announced by a heavenly choir. Romulus, the legendary co-founder of Rome, was taken up into heaven by a thick cloud. etc]

c) In second temple Judaism, we see many writings that talk about a general resurrection of the last days (i.e. an eschatological event). Jesus resurrection was interpreted within that context as the first of many resurrections that will come. Paul called Jesus resurrection as the "first fruit" (I Corinthians 15:20). The author of the first gospel was probably trying to convey the same idea when he wrote that many rose from the dead after Jesus' crucifixion (see Matthew 27:52-53).

B: Regarding... c)

The above is not sufficient to make it likely for the Jew Christians to expect Jesus to be resurrected because the common belief among them about resurrection was that the resurrection should happen only at the End Times and not at the time when evils were not yet dealt with and not at the time when "pagans" continue their lordship over the Jews, and should happen to them as a group instead of one single person ahead of others.

It was only after they perceived they encountered a resurrected Jesus then they began to modify the common Jewish belief about resurrection and start to proclaim a resurrection of a single person has taken place at a time when it should not have happened yet (i.e. not yet the END TIMES), and that the resurrection is split into two times, once for a single person, and then for all at another time.

About... b)

But all these gods dying and rising and then dying again then rising again then dying again (e.g. Adonis & Osiris) are in a different category from the Jewish idea of one-time unrepeatable bodily resurrection of human beings.

Jewish belief in resurrection was not about their god YHWH dying and rising. Neither is it about human beings dying and rising and dying and rising again and again; Jewish resurrection refers to a single, unrepeatable event.

Also, the idea of human beings dying and then ascending into heaven is also a different category from Jewish idea of bodily resurrection.

Hence there is a big difference between those ideas of dying and rising gods, and the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection of human beings returning to live in this world. There is a big difference also between the ideas of people ascending into heaven and the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection of human beings returning to live in this world.

(see N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p 80-81 on Dying and Rising Gods: "From the very early times, in Egypt and elsewere, some of the major religions centred their symbols, stories and praxis on the cycles of nature, and on the gods and goddesses who were believed to enart, or to have enarcted, these cycles in themselves. Thus there emerged, gradually and with far too many variations even to list, the well-known dying and rising gods and goddesses of the ancient near-east... Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris,...corn-kings and corn-mothers... At the heart of the cults was the ritual re-enactment of the death and rebirth of the god, coupled with sundry fertility rites. The productivity of the soil, and of the tribe or nation, was at stake... Did this in any way form an exception to the rule laid down in the ancient world [referring to the ancient's world's belief that human beings cannot be bodily resurrected after death]? Did any worshipper in these cults, from Egypt to Norway, at any time in antiquity, think that actual human beings, having died, actually came back to life? Of course not [i.e. bodily resurrection is not a part of such religions and their beliefs]. These multifarious and sophiscated cults enacted the god's death and resurrection as a metaphor, whose concrete referent was the cycle of seed-time and harvest, of human reproduction and fertility. Sometimes, as in Egypt, the myths and rituals include funerary practices: the aspiration fo the dead was to become united with Osiris. BUT THE NEW LIE THEY MIGHT THEREBY EXPERIENCE AS NOT A RETURN TO THE LIFE OF THE PRESENT WORLD... That which Homer and others [of the ancient world] meant by resurrection was not affirmed by the devotees of Osiris or their cousins elsewhere.... )

Jewish resurrection was not about their god YHWH dying and rising. Neither is it about human beings dying and rising and dying and rising again and again; Jewish resurrection refers to a single, unrepeatable event.

Hence the great difference between those ideas of dying and rising gods and Jewish bodily resurrection of human beings.

The idea of human beings dying and then ascending into heaven is also a different category from Jewish idea of bodily resurrection.

I attached also quoted passages on Adonis and Osiris below:

AdonisThe earliest known record of a tradition involving a revived Adonis comes from Lucian of Samosata, the author of De Dea Syria. In that work, he wrote of an annual ceremony commemorating the death, or apparent death, of Adonis and that he was killed, or apparently killed, by a boar:

"They say, at any rate, that the deed that was done to Adon by the boar occurred in their land, and in memory of that misfortune every year they beat their breasts and mourn and perform the ceremonies, making solemn lamentations throughout the country. And when the breast-beating and weeping is at end, first they make offerings to Adon as if to a dead person; and then, on the next day, they proclaim that he is alive and fetch him forth into the air, and shave their heads as the Egyptians do when Apis dies."

Regardless of whatever conclusions could be drawn from De Dea Syria, it should be noted that it was written during the second century AD, after the time of Jesus, and this poses a problem for people claiming that the tradition of a revived Adonis influenced Christianity. The problem is that New Testament was written during the previous century, meaning that Christianity could not have been influenced by De Dea Syria.

It should also be noted that the revivification of Adonis is very different than the resurrection of Jesus. Theocritus, a Greek poet during the third century AD, after the time of Jesus, indicates in his Psalm of Adonis that Adonis is revived for a single day each year and then is carried out to the sea. In contrast, the New Testament, which was written two centuries earlier, portrays Jesus as being resurrected once, and for eternity.

In Christianity, Jesus is not only "revived," he is also resurrected. He returns to life, completely and permanently. He defeats death, completely and permanently. And he promises a resurrection for anyone who has faith in him.

In contrast, the mythical revivification of Adonis is temporary. He does not defeat death. In fact, he returns to death. His "death and revivification" mirrors that of plants, not people. Plants die in the winter and are revived in the spring. But after the plants are revived, they die again - they return to death, as does the mythical Adonis.

Resurrection and revivification are not the same.

Osiris

A basic outline of the Osiris myth is provided by Plutarch, in his work entitled Osiris and Isis, that Osiris is tricked into lying in a wooden box which then is nailed shut like a coffin. The trapped Osiris is then drowned in the Nile. But his body is later recovered and dismembered, divided up into 14 or more pieces and scattered throughout the land. Isis, the wife of Osiris, collects the pieces of his body and re-assembles them, by wrapping them with linen.

There are two passages within the writing of Plutarch that might lead one to assume that the reconstruction of Osiris leads to a resurrection:

. "Later, as they relate, Osiris came to Horus from the other world and exercised and trained him for the battle." - Plutarch, Osiris and Isis.

. "In this way we shall undertake to deal with the numerous and tiresome people, whether they be such as take pleasure in associating theological problems with the seasonal changes in the surrounding atmosphere, or with the growth of the crops and seed-times and ploughing; and also those who say that Osiris is being buried at the time when the grain is sown and covered in the earth and that he comes to life and reappears when plants begin to sprout." - Plutarch, Osiris and Isis.

In the first passage, it is clear that Osiris returns in some form, but some scholars, including Anthony Mercantante, conclude that he returns in spirit form, not in body. In the second passage, the phrase "comes to life" is too ambiguous to conclude a bodily resurrection, because we are not being told whether he "comes to life" (or in some English translations, "returns to life") in a spirit form, or in a purely symbolic sense, or whether is coming to life as the plants themselves.

The traditions referenced above are at best too ambiguous to support claims of a bodily resurrection. And, at worst, they are too consistent with other pagan traditions, especially those that have been intertwined with the annual dying and rising of crops, to be of use as a prototype for a one-time-for-always bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It also should be noted that Plutarch, who lived during the second-half of the first century AD, is credited with writing the first coherent and detailed account of Osiris. There is no account within Plutarch's Osiris and Isis that could be construed as a virgin birth for Osiris, who is said to have been born of two other Egyptian deities, namely the god of the sky and the god of the earth.

Further complicating any claim that Osiris had a bodily resurrection is a writing from a Greek traveler named Strabo, who lived from about 63 BC to about 24 AD, and wrote of his travels throughout ancient world. In his book entitled Geography, Strabo wrote:

"A little above Sais is the asylum [tomb] of Osiris, in which the body of Osiris is said to lie; but many lay claim to this, and particularly the inhabitants of the Philae which is situated above Syene and Elephantine; for they tell the mythical story, namely, that Isis placed coffins of Osiris beneath the earth in several places (but only one of them, and that unknown to all, contained the body of Osiris), and that she did this because she wished to hide the body from Typhon, fearing that he might find it and cast it out of its tomb." - Strabo, Geography, Book XVII.

The key point here is that Strabo records a legend in which the body of Osiris is believed to be lying in a tomb, flatly contradicting the claim of Till or Graves that the Osiris legend culminates with a bodily resurrection.

The mythology of Osiris, in fact, culminates not with a bodily resurrection but with Osiris becoming some sort of a spirit who rules the underworld.

A: "The above is not sufficient to make it likely for the Jew Christians to expect Jesus to be resurrected because the common belief among them about resurrection was that the resurrection should happen only at the End Times..."

I like the "not sufficient" remark above. Notice how such a remark is never used when considering the historical reality of the resurrection?!

Anyway your remark flies against the evidence:

i) We have strong evidence that the early Christians thought they were living in the end times!

That was why Paul called Jesus' resurrections, the first fruit! In addition to that let me give you a few quotes from the NT:

Mark 9:1 (see also Mark 13:24-30 quoted above) He [Jesus] said to them, “Most certainly I tell you, there are some standing here who will in no way taste death until they see the Kingdom of God come with power.”

M (Matthew 10:23) [Jesus said] [F]or most certainly I tell you, you will not have gone through the cities of Israel, until the Son of Man has come.

I Thessalonians 4:15 For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep.

ii) Finally we have the evidence from the Gospel itself that such a belief was present in that time, for didn’t Mark 6:14-16 tell is that Herod thought Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead? In other words the belief that someone could rise from the dead is present in Jewish culture at that time.

The above cluster of evidence shows that the probability is not zero that the apostles could have such similar "a-priori" beliefs (like Herod did) which would make them more susceptible to Jesus sighting hallucinations. This probability towers over the probability that someone could rise from the dead after three days - to this date, the probability for this is indistinguishable from zero.

B. In your quote of NT Wright's book "The Resurrection of the son of God" There main point he raised (which I presume you agree with) is that the myths of the rising and dying gods are sufficiently different as to have no impact on Christian belief in the resurrection.

In his review of Wright's book, Robert M. Price (who, like Wright) is also a professor of the New Testament has this to say:

"The most striking of these blustering evasions has to do with the dying-and-rising redeemer cults that permeated the environment of early Christianity and had for many, many centuries. Ezekiel 8:14 bemoans the ancient Jerusalemite women's lamentation for Tammuz, derived from the Dumuzi cult of ancient Mesopotamia. Ugaritic texts make it plain that Baal's death and resurrection and subsequent enthronement at the side of his Father El went back centuries before Christianity and were widespread in Israel. Pyramid texts tell us that Osiris' devotees expected to share in his resurrection. Marduk, too, rose from the dead. And then there is the Phrygian Attis, the Syrian Adonis. The harmonistic efforts of Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Ron Sider, Jonathan Z. Smith and others have been completely futile, utterly failing either to deconstruct the dying-and-rising god mytheme (as Smith vainly tries to do) or to claim that the Mysteries borrowed their resurrected savior myths and rituals from Christianity. If that were so, why on earth did early apologists admit that the pagan versions were earlier, invented as counterfeits before the fact by Satan? Such myths and rites were well known to Jews and Galileans, not to mention Ephesians, Corinthians, etc., for many centuries. But all this Wright merely brushes off, as if it has long been discredited. He merely refers us to other books. It is all part of his bluff: "Oh, no one takes that seriously anymore! Really, it's so passé!"" (You can access the full review on line: http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/rev_ntwrong.htm)

I (A) would like to add that to say that the early Christians DO NOT think their beliefs are similar to the pagans is one of the biggest lies told by evangelical scholars such as Wright, Craig and their Ilk. Let me quote you a passage from the mid second century Christian, Justin Martyr, who in trying to convince the pagans that Christian beliefs are "not really all that different" from theirs wrote these revealing passages:

"And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; AEsculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre? And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know. This only shall be said, that they are written for the advantage and encouragement of youthful scholars; for all reckon it an honourable thing to imitate the gods. But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked devils perpetrated these things. And we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire." [First Apology of Justin, Chapter 21: you can see this text on line: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-firstapology.html]

So the idea that "people can rise from the dead" is an idea which permeates the cultures of the day. To say that there are "not exactly the same" as the resurrection accounts in the NT is disingenuous - nobody is claiming that! The point is that such beliefs make it more likely that the early followers would have accepted the resurrection of Jesus as more likely.

I hope you see why I feel that statements about belief in the resurrection is rational can only be made if one is, as Winston Churchill so deliciously put it, "economical with the facts."

A: Java can actually be used to write good desktop program, such as Eclipse (the Java IDE that is written using Java). it has its own basket of problems because programmers nowadays anyhow whack and don't have much understanding about what they are writing. simple things like knowing how Java manage memory seems to elude many programmers (and CS undergrads and grads alike). then again, nothing can be worse than Flash AS d: (except Basic maybe).

B: Understatement. Most java programmers are unaware of the concept of memory.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Why are 80% of the world's refugees women and dependent children? Because the men get killed.

Buddha said that a jug fills drop by drop, but that's only if the water doesn't evaporate.

On why 4 kids is perfect: "1 is too lonely.
2 is too standard and not lively enough.
3 is too political (they can't fight easily since 1 v 1 can turn into 1 v 2 easily; not good).
4 is just nice.
the oldest one must not be a guy?... don't want my kids to start killing each other."

RT @dweam Teach a boy how to fish and he will never go hungry again. Teach a girl photoshop and she will never look ugly again.

"sometimes i wonder if the old man and [Mahathir] are on a competition to see who says the stupidest things"

"social work papers are usually not real papers. they are magazine articles in disguise."

"When petite girls says, "good thing comes in small packages". I say, "hey, be consistent with that comment!""

"okay, i guess having bigger breasts than Stefanie Sun isn't an achievement. it's equivalent to saying that i'm not as ugly as Michael Jackson"

"if it's NSFW, it must be interesting"

"*** pointed out the other day that evian is naive spelled backwards... hahah"

Architectural insights from @vincentliu_bear on how Feng Shui is common sense:
"courtyards invite water and fresh air into the building which helps with air circulation
cities with backs towards mountains and facing seas - less chance of surprise attacks from invaders"

"[The] cost of living in Boston and Singapore are in fact quite similar. Obviously you can argue about the appropriate basket of goods and services to compare, but the stark reality is that living costs in SG have long since caught up with much of the developed world... You really ought to explore the food truck scene here... I was last back in early 2008, and before that in mid 2004. Between those two visits I noticed a uniform price increase of everything from public transport to hawker food of about 50% across the board. Some places kept their prices the same but reduced the quantity of goods by roughly that much too."

On why Tong Seng coffeeshop sells the worst hae mee I've ever eaten: "If you can't sell it to the Chinese......sell it to the Malay/Muslims who don't have much choice. Always wanted to know what a real Hainanese Chicken Rice taste like....but chances are, if it's HALAL....it isn't very good."

"if i had more time i'd collect their stock phrases and create a TR machine: input current topic (HDB prices, new immigrants, democracy) and choice of leader to whack (LKY, LKY, LKY), together with current news story (ST, CNA, wires). cut and paste, insert relevant TR phrase, ta da! ;)"

"Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are." - Laurence J. Peter

***

Career U. - Making College ‘Relevant’ - "The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major... In 1971, 37 percent [of incoming freshmen] responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed... The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers... what they want institutions to teach... 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative”... With the recession, she says, they weren’t sure the findings would hold. “But it’s even more intense. Companies are demanding more of employees. They really want them to have a broad set of skills”... “The truth is,” she says, “students think too much about majors. But the major isn’t nearly as important as the toolbox of skills you come out with and the experiences you have”"

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong: Reredundancy Rerevisited: Hoi Polloi - "My favorite such “redundancy” involves the professional baseball team that began as The Los Angeles Angels. That name translates into “the the angels angels”... I find it interesting to note that the Oxford English Dictionary cites seven manuscripts using the phrase hoi polloi over the centuries. Five of the seven references insert English “the” before the phrase. Granted, two references were from learned authors, John Dryden and Lord George Gordon Byron, which would explain the two holdouts. Would, but doesn’t. Both Dryden and Byron use that icky the-word before hoi polloi."Dryden: "If by the people you understand the multitude, the οἱ πολλοί"

How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get - "Black women write back the most
White men get more responses
White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively
Men don’t write black women back"This roughly fits my theory of inter-racial dating.

Summertime Mystery: More Born, Fewer Die in August - "The modern American birth pattern, though common in some other parts of the world, does not prevail everywhere. Births in parts of Europe tend to peak in spring -- just as U.S. births dip -- and generally decline through the rest of the year. Some studies found a secondary peak in September in parts of Europe. Globally, the European-style spring peak in births "has been considered to be a basic rhythm of human reproduction"... the growing ubiquitousness of air conditioning may be altering birth seasonality in the United States"

How US interrogators use music as a tool of torture - "The proponents of torture by music doubtless think they have come a long way since the early 1990s, when the FBI blasted loud music at the Branch Davidians during the Waco siege in Texas. The repertoire then included Sing-Along With Mitch Miller Christmas carols, an Andy Williams album and These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra... One budding Emcee artfully mixed the sound of crying babies (which humans seem hardwired to abhor) with a television commercial for Meow Mix cat food. Ultimately, though, the most overused torture song is I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur... "Most people who listen to this kind of music don't give a shit about a political message. They just wanna rock""

'White African-American' Suing N.J. Med School for Discrimination - "Born and raised in Mozambique... he was harassed and ultimately suspended for identifying himself during a class cultural exercise as a "white African-American"... he was instructed "never to define himself as an African-American … because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so"... Serodio only labeled himself after his instructors asked him to do so and was then penalized for it... according to the lawsuit, the harassment, some physical, began in earnest. According to the lawsuit, Serodio's tires were vandalized in December of 2006, other students put up posters slamming him and he was denied protection by the school""I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!"A comment: "Only in America do we redefine words to calm the sensitivities of the easily offended"
Serodio on allaboutrace: "I refused to be intimidated and bullied by 4 deans, some 10 professors and (as yet undisclosed) organized harassers that manipulated the institution to destroy what they saw as the opposite political view", and providing the article he wrote

'Equation,' 'Gingerly' And Other Linguistic Pet Peeves - "Saying that you have a pet peeve about "thinking outside the box" or "Your call is important to us" is like saying you have a pet theory that you should feed a cold and starve a fever... Bierce had a gift for discerning usage errors where no one else would have thought there was anything amiss... personal crotchets are presented as the authorized standards of proper speech, as if you could decree the tune the language is obliged to dance to. But the English language doesn't owe anybody a living — it was here first"

More sex education please, we’re British - "I bumped into eight-year-old Carla carefully balancing a dish. It was a sample of her father’s sperm for “show and tell”. In the Netherlands, sex and children aren’t a taboo subject... The country now has the lowest rates of sexually transmitted diseases among young people, the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the West, the lowest rate of abortion and one of the lowest rates of divorce"

Ft. Hood suspect was Army dilemma - "Army superiors were warned about the radicalization of Major Nidal Malik Hasan years before he allegedly massacred 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, but did not act in part because they valued the rare diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist... Examples of Hasan’s radical behavior [include] his defense of suicide bombings and assertions that Islamic law took priority over his allegiance to the United States... Hasan’s views and behavior were so well known that before he was transferred to Fort Hood in July 2009 a senior health official at Walter Reed informed a counterpart at the Texas base"Affirmative action harms everyone - even those it's supposed to help.

Politics of the Crypt: Facing the Future with the Habsburg Dead - "Today, though, aside from the monks and the city of Vienna, only a "Society for the Preservation of the Imperial Crypt," with around a thousand members, sees to it that the deposed Habsburgs' Valhalla, at least, still reflects the family's former splendor... Even 90 years after it enacted the Habsburg Law, the Republic of Austria still greets requests from the former dynasty with "limited enthusiasm," in the words of the president of Austria's Federal Monument Office"

Cold days, hot nights: Olympic Village secrets - "“It’s eye candy all the time. Everybody’s checking everybody else out from moment they get there”... the Vancouver organizers have laid in a stock of 100,000 condoms, which works out to 14 for each of the 7,000 athletes, coaches, trainers and officials housed in the Games’ two villages... In 2000, Sydney organizers thought that 70,000 would be enough. They were wrong and had to send out for 20,000 more. Beijing also ordered 100,000 condoms with an Olympic motto: Faster, higher, stronger... no one will go on the record when talking about certain female figure skaters — no home country was specified — who, as one former athlete put it, “really liked hockey players — and I use the plural. I think Sweden was a very grateful country for that”"

Wanted: naughty pagan girls - "[I] love going down like a sinking submarine on beautiful women...
Send a pic,
don't be meek:
time will tell
if we gel."...................

I Want To Play With This Controller Shirt - "Russian shop MaryJane is selling this shirt for 1290 rubles (approx. $42 USD) for both the men’s and women’s versions. Play with this controller now!"That's one expensive T-short

Photographer captures amazing images of lions at watering hole after submerging himself for three months - "It came at a huge price for the photographer who was diagnosed with Bilharzia and contracted several parasites which he soaked up through the dirty water in the drinking hole. Mr du Toit was also diagnosed with deadly malaria twice after contracting it through mosquitoes breeding in the pool... 'This worm was actually visible under the skin of my foot and would move at night. It became a game to find the worm in my foot each morning'"

Photography under threat: The shooting party’s over - "In the most spied-on
country in the world, with an estimated 4.2m CCTV cameras tracking our moves, people are now suspicious if Joe Nikon presses his shutter button... “Some of the greatest pieces of photographic art we have — reportage and street photography and cityscapes — wouldn’t be possible if people didn’t have the freedom to go around and take pictures without being stopped”... It’s personal memory and public history, and, say photographers, it’s under threat... Previously the police had at least to cite reasonable grounds for suspicion in order to stop and search you; now they don’t. If you’re wearing a loud shirt, walking on the pavement cracks, or carrying a camera, you’re fair game... "I dislike the idea of government being the only people allowed to take pictures, which is what this appears to be""

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord - "“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed”... “ ‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights”... A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons"

The Straight Dope: Is mass transit a waste of energy? - "Let's compare the average energy efficiency of different methods of transportation, expressed in British thermal units (BTUs) per passenger mile...
Motorcycle — 2,200 with single rider.
Heavy rail (includes subway and commuter rail but excludes light rail/streetcar) — 2,600.
Commercial aircraft — 3,100.
Bus — 4,300.
Auto — 5,500 with single occupant, 3,500 with average passenger load...
If the proposed 35 MPG fuel efficiency standard becomes reality, auto energy consumption with an average load will drop to an impressively low 2,300 BTUs per passenger mile... Buses are more efficient than a passengerless car, but that's about it"

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Soren Kierkegaard

***

For some reason, it seems that I've interacted with more people who think a single counter-example is enough to prove a generalisation or stereotype wrong (in other words, those who confuse the concepts of range and mean [or, perhaps, confidence intervals]) than people who think that stereotypes always hold.

Given how much people talk about the importance of combating stereotypes, perhaps this reveals that the oft-mentioned person who cannot think beyond stereotypes is a classic bogeyman, in the vein of the proverbial "Ah Pu Neh Neh".

Perhaps this is because the people I interact with on such issues are those who have a higher level of education, but then this would be proof that "education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices".

In any case, at the root of both attitudes is a poverty of statistical reasoning.

Or perhaps just prejudices interfering with what one should already know; it is revealing that the same logic does not apply in reverse - for example, that a Black Man can become the President of the United States means that you can't say that White Privilege exists in the US.

B: I dont classify this issue [of hiring women for sales jobs] under discrimination. If not, I can also say that hiring pretty girls for front line services is not only discrimination towards males BUT towards ugly girls too! =)

If you are selling feminine products, it is wiser to hire hot guys.Likewise, if you are selling gadgets and cars, it is only natural to hire sexy young girls.

Never will car companies dare hire old ladies or overweight, unfit girls to promote their latest vehicles during a car show right?Unless if the car show is supposed to be a public joke!

A: Maybe it is discrimination but that we are simply ignoring it? After all no one likes to look upon themselves in a bad light. When blacks were still slaves in America, no one wanted to think it was discrimination because majority felt it was right to enslave the blacks. Majority has always ruled society after all. Might and safety in numbers.

Noelle-Nueman's Spiral of Silence theory could apply not just to minorities but maybe in this scenario as well don't you think? It seems fine to portray beautiful people on the front line and indirectly discriminate against less appealing people and no one wants to speak out against it.

B: But I think a lot more people will speak out if the front line is largely dominated by fat, ugly or even toothless people! LOL!

The reason, why nobody speaks out when portraying beautiful people on the front line indirectly discriminates against less appealing people, is not because of spiral of silence but because people like it.

A: You misunderstand me. I was refering to the "fat, ugly or even toothless" people who don't speak out. In this case, they constitute the "minority" section of the the Spiral's theory.

Me: We discriminate against the lazy and the stupid all the time

A: You uncharacteristic lack of support is disturbing. In addition to that, you make assumptous, sweeping statements that does not hold as much water as you seem to believe they do.

Me: I thought it would be obvious that we discriminate against the lazy and the stupid all the time.

There's something to be said about universal skepticism as a method for finding truth, but if you apply it in everyday life we'll never get anything done.

Do you want me to support the assertion that Singapore is hot and humid as well, or will you again accuse me of making assumptous (sic), sweeping statements that does (sic) not hold as much water as I seem to believe they do?

A: It is clear and undeniable that Singapore is hot and humid, it is however, not clear that everyone discriminates against the lazy and stupid. Just because you don't know anyone who does not discriminate against them, doesn't mean everyone is the same.

Me: *facepalm*

Next you'll be saying that the US Declaration of Independence is invalid, because not everyone in the Thirteen Colonies held it to be "self-evident" that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

B: Hi there [A],

When you are using Noelle-Nueman's Spiral of Silence effect as an explanation, you must understand that the "minorities", that is mentioned in Noelle-Nueman's Spiral of Silence, refers to the smaller population who holds the controversial opinion. The "minorities" does not necessarily mean the "victims" in the topic, that is being discussed. The "fat, ugly or even toothless" people are just the objects (and also victims in this case) of this discussion. They do not necessarily have to be the "minorities". =)

In fact, the "fat, ugly or even toothless" people in this society should be the MAJORITY because not every girl is borned a sexy car-show model!

When you want to use Noelle-Nueman's Spiral of Silence effect in here, you must understand that the "minorities" can be any random person (the sexy, ugly, pretty, beautiful, thin, fat, etc.) who is out to advocate that "Car-show can hire FAT chicks".

Sunday, March 07, 2010

"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." - Gore Vidal

***

Here is overwhelming evidence for my dictum that "it's as easy to find a guy who isn't horny as it is to find a girl who doesn't want to be pretty" (well, the first part, anyway).

The part on paraphilias also provides support for the claim that men are more kinky than women. There's also an intriguing bit which might help inform why girls like slash/yaoi. And yet more evidence is offered which supports my claim that getting married without having pre-marital sex is irresponsible.

"The ideal would be that the average sex drive would be equally strong in men and women, in which case individual variations would be the only obstacle to marital harmony, and many people could find a partner with a fairly precise match of sexual inclinations...

In any given relationship, whichever partner wants sex more is in a weaker position, insofar as greater desire creates dependency on the partner. To the extent that sex can serve as a medium for social exchange involving any other social or material resources, it may influence the entire relationship. Gender roles and marital equity will depend on whether other resources are indeed exchanged in a way to make up the imbalance in sexual interest. Thus, unequal sex drives may shape the broader marital relationship in ways that go far beyond the bedroom...

When we told people we were studying whether men and women differ in strength of sex drive, most people responded by saying that the answer was obvious-- but when we cautiously asked them what the obvious answer was, we heard all three possible answers (i.e., men higher, women higher, no difference) endorsed...

We also consulted leading textbooks on sexuality to find whether any consensus existed on the topic about gender differences in sex drive, but the answer appeared to be no...

The only viable way to address the question of differential sex drive is in a broad literature review that examines many studies by different investigators, using different methods and measures, and with different samples...

The sex drive is best understood in terms of the frequency and intensity of desire...

One would expect the difference in motivation to be reflected in desired frequency of sex, desired variety of sex acts and partners, frequency of fantasy, frequency of masturbation, number of partners, frequency of thinking about sex, willingness to make sacrifices in other spheres to obtain sex, and the like...

Our initial strategy was to read all abstracts of all articles in the Journal of Sex Research from the initial (1965) volume up to the present...

Same-sex relationships provide relevant evidence about gender differences in sex drive. People in these relationships are clearly willing to defy social pressures favoring heterosexuality, at least to the extent of forming a committed same-gender relationship, and so it is reasonable to conclude that people are not simply conforming to social prescriptions. Also, the same-gender relationships are relatively free of the direct influence of the opposite gender, and so it is possible to examine what sexual patterns look like when they are set by only one gender...

Gay men had higher frequencies of sex than lesbians at all stages of relationships... the gay men who had largely ceased having sex after 10 years together were often having sex with other partners, whereas the lesbians who had ceased having sex together had generally not compensated for this deficit by finding other sexual outlets. A lack of sexual desire and activity in women is reflected in the phrase "lesbian bed death," (e.g., Iasenza, 2000) which has been coined to describe the low levels of sexual activity among lesbians in long-term relationships...

Sanders and Reinisch... asked a sample of students "Would you say you had sex if ..." and then presented a list of possible activities. Men and women agreed very closely that vaginal and anal intercourse constituted sex and that kissing did not, but they disagreed on the intermediate activities such as fellatio, cunnilingus, and manual stimulation of a partner's genitals. Men were consistently more likely to rate those activities as sex than women. This fits the view that men desired to count those activities as having had sex, which would serve the goal of enabling them to think they had a higher number of sex partners...

The subculture of gay men did briefly establish bathhouses and other institutions that allowed men to have sex with half a dozen or more partners in a single evening. Even though lesbians are better able than gay men to engage in such promiscuity (because of the lack of refractory period), lesbian communities do not seem to have created any market for such institutionalized orgiastic behavior...

Some have proposed that society disproportionately discourages girls from masturbating, so that the gender difference in masturbation may reflect socialization. For example, they claim that society does not teach girls to masturbate or approve of their doing so. We find these arguments dubious. Society has certainly expressed strong and consistent disapproval of masturbation by boys, and if anything the pressures have been more severe on boys than girls. For example, the warnings about blindness and insanity (as putative consequences of masturbation) were mainly directed at young males, not females.

As to the feminist suggestion that society fails to teach girls to masturbate, literally that may be true, but we do not think that society teaches boys to masturbate either. Arafat and Cotton (1974) found that half the girls and more than half the boys (who masturbated) said they discovered it themselves... The high rates of self-taught masturbation suggest that it is not a technically recondite, esoteric practice. Anyone who wants to masturbate can probably figure out how to do it...

[A] possible objection in terms of guilt would be that men and women have an equal desire to masturbate but guilt weighs more heavily on women than men. This is directly contradicted, however, by Arafat and Cotton's (1974) finding that more males (13%) than females (10%) reported feeling guilty after masturbation. By the same token, more males than females said they regarded their masturbatory activities as perverse (5% vs. 1%). Thus, if anything, guilt weighs more heavily on men.

If not guilt, then what is the major deterrent to masturbation? According to Arafat and Cotton's (1974) data, the most common reason for not masturbating was a lack of desire, and that was reported by more of the nonmasturbating females (76%) than the nonmasturbating males (56%)...

Another very instructive case concerns clerical vows of celibacy. This is especially important because there is no question of separate values or double standard: Among Catholic Christian clergy, both men and women take profoundly important and sacred vows to forego all sexual gratification throughout life. The single standard of absolute purity is thus clear to both priests and nuns. Yet the evidence suggests that nuns are far more successful than priests at achieving that ideal...

Fewer sexual practices appeal to women than men... On 13 of the 14 practices, a higher percentage of men than women rated the activity as appealing, and the 14th showed no difference ("being forced by a sex partner")...

Although the list used by Laumann et al. (1994) contained practices that are favored by people in the so-called normal range of sexual activity, such as watching a partner undress, receiving oral sex, or stimulating the anus with a finger, a similar conclusion emerges from examination of unusual or deviant variations of sexuality. Nearly all the paraphilias appeal to men more than women...

The greater appeal of multiple practices to men than women is not confined to the modern United States. A study of elderly people in Sweden, which is supposedly a very egalitarian and sexually liberated culture, found that men liked the full span of sexual activities more than women...

Some might object that most pornography is more geared toward men than women. There are two reasons to dismiss this objection, however. First, several studies have found that women do have strong physiological responses to pornography and experience levels of sexual arousal that compare with men's (e.g., Fisher & Byrne, 1978; also Heiman, 1977). It is thus clear that currently available pornography is amply arousing to women. Once they see it, they like it and find it stimulating--but women are simply not sufficiently motivated to seek out that kind of stimulation as often as men.

The other reason to dismiss the argument of gender bias in the sex industry is that if the market existed for a special, female-targeted pornography, it is highly likely that someone would have been willing and eager to make the millions of dollars that it would represent. In actual fact, the sex industry has tried repeatedly to reach out to women, but it has repeatedly failed... unlike the male market for pictures of nude women, which has sustained an assortment of magazines for decades.

Another instructive category is the purchase of sexual aids and devices: There too one expends money to obtain sexual pleasure. Both men and women find such purchases embarrassing, but men are more willing to swallow their pride and make such a purchase (Laumann et al., 1994). This is true even though what is available for women (vibrators) seems superior to anything available to men (see C. M. Davis, Blank, Lin, & Bonillas, 1996). The vibrator is thus a further counterargument to the view that the sex industry is only aimed at men...

There is some evidence that women only have extramarital affairs when they are dissatisfied with their marriage...

One could examine the expenditure of other resources for the sake of sex. We do not know of systematic studies, but we predict that the same conclusion would emerge. Jeopardizing one's career for the sake of a sexual indulgence would be one relevant measure. To our knowledge, female politicians and leaders have not had their careers endangered by sex scandals almost at all, whereas such scandals have damaged and even ended careers by male politicians. It is conceivable that an anti-male bias in the media leads to greater exposure of men than women, but we think that the American press is sufficiently free and competitive that it would be eager to publicize sexual misdeeds by eminent, powerful women if it could find evidence of them...

Women have less permissive attitudes toward sex than men. Although they are equal on some things, generally women are more critical of promiscuity, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and various other sexual activities...

The main exception to the greater permissiveness of males is in attitudes toward homosexuality... Whitley (1988) found that both men and women were more permissive toward homosexuality of the other gender but more opposed to their own gender's homosexuality...

A highly specific and relevant set of attitudes concerns liking for sex organs. One would predict that a person with a high sex drive would have more favorable attitudes toward sex organs than a person with lower sex drive.

Attitudes toward sex organs were assessed by Reinholtz and Muehlenhard (1995). They found that men held more favorable opinions of their own sex organs (i.e., their penises) than women held toward theirs (i.e., their vaginas). One might object that these judgments are confounded by the physical nature of the organs themselves, such as if the penis were inherently more lovable than the vagina, but this interpretation is contradicted by additional findings: Men rated their girlfriends' vaginas more favorably than the women rated their boyfriends' penises...

Low sexual motivation was related to marital adjustment problems. Beck (1995) also reported that hyposexuality is strongly related to poor dyadic adjustment (e.g., Stuart, Hammond, & Pett, 1987; Trudel, Boulos, & Matte, 1993). A study of sexuality and relationship indexes found that sexual desire discrepancies (the difference between each partner's level of sexual desire) predicted overall relationship satisfaction (Davies, Katz, & Jackson, 1999). A discrepancy in which the woman has lower sexual desire than the man appeared to be especially problematic, with these women reporting lower relationship and sexual satisfaction than women who matched or exceeded their partner's level of sexual desire...

Far more women (19%) than men (2%) claimed that they never felt that they wanted or needed sex. Moreover, even when sexual tension or desire was felt, it was apparently less intense among the women. Most of the men (80%) but only 25% of the women said they preferred to have sex as a way of releasing sexual tension when they did feel it. Instead, women said they preferred to engage in vigorous physical activity (50%) or even just watch television (20%)...

By virtue of the very biological structure of the sex organs, women have superior capacity to men. Women can copulate with more consecutive partners than men, can copulate for a longer period of time, and can achieve more orgasms during a single session than men can. We can think of no aspect of sex in which men's capacity for sexual performance matches or exceeds women's, other than the reliable incidence of orgasm... Women clearly have a greater overall capacity for sex than men...

Given the current state of knowledge, we regard the question of which gender enjoys sex more as unanswerable...

We have surveyed a broad range of available evidence on the relative strength of sex drive, defined in terms of sexual motivation. The evidence was extensive, methodologically diverse, and consistent. By all measures, men have a stronger sex drive than women. Men think about sex more often, experience more frequent sexual arousal, have more frequent and varied fantasies, desire sex more often, desire more partners, masturbate more, want sex sooner, are less able or willing to live without sexual gratification, initiate more and refuse less sex, expend more resources and make more sacrifices for sex, desire and enjoy a broader variety of sexual practices, have more favorable and permissive attitudes toward most sexual activities, have fewer complaints about low sex drive in themselves (but more about their partners), and rate their sex drives as stronger than women. There were no measures that showed women having stronger drives than men...

Any conception of sexual desire or drive that does not recognize frequency of feelings of desire, range and frequency of fantasy, preferred number of partners, ease of arousal, preferred frequency of sex, time and money invested, masturbation, desire for variety of activities, and the rest of the variables covered previously would have to be so peculiarly constructed as to be almost incoherent.

We do not wish this conclusion to be misunderstood or to be misused for ideological purposes...

Research by Byers and Lewis (1988) on disagreements about sex has found that almost half of all heterosexual couples disagree about sex, and every single disagreement involved the man desiring some sexual activity that his female partner did not...

Differences in naturally occurring testosterone levels distinguish between two subtypes of lesbians, "butch" versus "femme" (Singh, Vidaurri, Zambarano, & Dabbs, 1999). Lesbians classify a butch lesbian (as opposed to being a femme lesbian) by body build and weight, gait, style of dress, and attitude, with butches being bigger in size, more active, and less pretty than femmes (Loulan, 1990). Degree of self-rated butchness was predicted by testosterone level (β = .51; see similar findings by Pearcey, Dochert, & Dabbs, 1996), a relation that was statistically significant even after controlling for related factors such as body weight and age. Additional data from this study revealed that butch lesbians were involved in more sexual relationships in the past 2 years, reported less desire to give birth but reported more desire to raise children relative to femme lesbians, and were less likely to adopt a submissive style of sexual participation. Butch lesbians also reported greater enjoyment of erotica relative to heterosexual women. In discussing their findings, Singh et al. (1999) related the style of butch lesbians to sexual behaviors typical of men; their findings regarding higher testosterone levels among these women corroborates our conclusion that testosterone is an important determinant of sexual drive...

There may also exist a biological basis for gender differences in sex drive through differences in genital size, a factor hypothesized to subsequently influence sexual motivation through learning experiences...

We noted in our review of the evidence that a study from the Netherlands (Vanwesenbeeck et al., 1998) also supports our conclusion of a weaker sex drive among women... Given the highly permissive attitudes about sex in the Netherlands, which would allow women to freely express their sexual desires, these data argue against a confirmation of the null hypothesis of no differences in sex drive as a function of gender...

A review of passionate love and, specifically, sexual desire (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993) concluded that there exists much more similarity than differences in patterns of sexual desire among major cultural groups... the available anthropological and cross-cultural evidence suggests that men have a stronger sex drive than women...

The best bet is therefore probably that society's influence may have at various times tried to increase or reduce the gender difference in sex drive, but it did not likely reverse the natural order of things, nor did it create the difference out of nothing. Probably gender differences in sex drive reflect a combination of natural and cultural influences...

Cultural influences have sought to stifle some aspects of female sexuality, but we found the difference in sex drive even in sexual spheres (such as marital sex) where culture has supported and encouraged female sexual desire, so stifling should not be relevant...

Many male-female romantic interactions will take the form of the man offering the woman some resources (commitment, flattery, food, entertainment, money, companionship) to induce her to commence a sexual relationship...

Some authors have hinted that there has been pressure to assume men and women have equal sexual motivations (e.g., Leigh, 1989). The assumption of equality would have steered theory in certain directions, such as forcing theorists to invoke ulterior (e.g., political) explanations for men's greater interest in pornography, prostitution, and the like. Even analyses of marriage may have had to regard men's sexual demands on their wives as rooted in nonsexual motives, to explain the differential sexual behavior without violating the (false) principle of equal sex drive. Although political factors can certainly influence sexual behavior, we suggest that the political motives are likely to interact with and develop around the basic gender difference in sexual motivation. More generally, the point that men want sex more than women is likely to become a focal issue in how most couples negotiate their sex lives, from first dates to losing virginity to multidecade marriages. An accurate, empirically grounded appreciation of the gender difference in sex drive should be a helpful part of the foundation for advancing theory about human sexuality and relationships...

All the evidence we have reviewed points toward the conclusion that men desire sex more than women. Although some of the findings were more methodologically rigorous than others, the unanimous convergence across all measures and findings increases confidence. We did not find a single study, on any of nearly a dozen different measures, that found women had a stronger sex drive than men. We think that the combined quantity, quality, diversity, and convergence of the evidence render the conclusion indisputable."

Very strangely, in response to this I was told that is "pathetically outdated" and that:

"in the social science field... a decade old literature is never reliable. It increases the chances of error to at least 10% and social science fields allow up to 5% error in statistical calculation"

Which flies against everything I know and have read.

My enquiry about which discipline the person was from went unanswered, sadly.

Keywords: less horny, women sex drive, conclusive proof that men are more horny than women, men want sex more than women